Adventures in urban beekeeping

The bees made it here yesterday and were installed in their hive without a hitch. Over the next couple days, I’ll show you what it’s like to install a package of bees in a new hive.

First things first. Bees need something to eat when they move to a new hive, so before they arrived, I heated about 2 gallons of water on the stove, then mixed in about 8 pounds of white sugar once it was close to boiling and stirred until everything was dissolved. This is called light syrup, and it’s what beekeepers feed to their bees in the spring. If they need food in the fall, I’ll use about twice as much sugar in the same amount of water.

Once it’s ready, the syrup goes into two pails and a spray bottle.

Here’s the syrup cooling on my front steps.

The pails will go inside the beehive, upside-down and the bees will be able to crawl under and get a drink. There are tiny holes in the lids, and the bees can drink from them without the syrup flooding out and getting the hive wet.

Here’s a lid so you can see what I mean.

Once they were cool, I left the syrup pails by the hive, and took the spray bottle along when I picked up my bees.

I did have a problem with the sentence below. Maybe it should be two or three smaller sentences.

“Bees need something to eat when they move to a new hive, so before they arrived, I heated about 2 gallons of water on the stove, then mixed in about 8 pounds of white sugar once it was close to boiling and stirred until everything was dissolved.”

Hello and thanks for the comment! You can tell I’m still finding my feet on this blog, and that I haven’t quite figured out the best way to say things. I hope everyone will be patient with me as it takes shape!